German Chancellor Olaf Scholz yesterday visited the site of a deadly car-ramming attack on a crowded Christmas market that shocked the nation to pay tribute to the victims.
Police arrested a 50-year-old Saudi doctor of psychiatry at the scene where two people were killed and 68 injured when an SUV ploughed through the festive crowd on Friday night.
A somber Scholz, dressed in black, was joined by national and regional politicians and a security detail in the eastern city of Magdeburg, where they laid flowers outside the main church.
Photo: AFP
Mourning and bereaved people had already left candles, flowers and children’s toys at the St. John’s church, where a memorial service was planned for 7:00pm.
As Germany was reeling from the shocking attack, which came eight years after a Muslim militant strike on a Berlin Christmas market claimed 13 lives, more details emerged about the Saudi man under arrest. Named by German media as Taleb A., he was a doctor who had lived in Germany since 2006 and held a permanent residence permit, working in a clinic near Magdeburg.
He had long also worked as a rights activist who supported Saudi women and described himself as a “Saudi atheist.” The man voiced strongly anti-Islam views, echoing the rhetoric of the far-right, his social media posts and past interviews showed.
As his views expressed online grew more radical, he accused Germany’s past governments of a plan to “Islamize Europe” and voiced fears he was being targeted by authorities.
The Bild daily reported that an initial drug test had proved positive, after police officers on Friday used a so-called test that can detect narcotics ranging from cannabis to cocaine and methamphetamines.
Surveillance video of the attack showed a black BMW driving at high speed straight through a dense crowd, running over or scattering bodies amid the festive stalls selling snacks, handicrafts and traditional mulled wine.
Police said the vehicle drove “at least 400m across the Christmas market,” leaving behind destruction, debris and broken glass on the city’s central town hall square.
The attack came eight years after Tunisian man drove a truck through a Berlin Christmas market, killing 13 people in Germany’s deadliest radical Muslim attack.
“I don’t know what world we’re living in, where someone would use such a peaceful event to spread terror.” One woman told Die Welt daily.
The sorrow and anger sparked by the latest attack, in which a child was killed, seemed set to inflame a heated debate on immigration and security as Germany heads for Feb. 23 elections.
“When will this madness stop?” Alice Weidel, leader of far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has focused on Muslim attacks in its campaign against immigrants, wrote on X.
“What happened today affects a lot of people. It affects us a lot,” Fael Kelion, a 27-year-old Cameroonian living in the city, said.
“I think that since [the suspect] is a foreigner, the population will be unhappy, less welcoming,” he said.
Michael Raarig, 67, an engineer, expressed his sorrow at the site, saying that “I am sad, I am shocked. I never would have believed this could happen, here in an east German provincial town.”
He added that he believed the attack “will play into the hands of the AfD” which has had its strongest support in the formerly communist eastern Germany.
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